Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [80]
It was by staying at Ponce’s apartment that I met an elderly Haitian who claimed to have been comrades-in-arms with Che. Laurent was a tall, spry, ebullient old man with jaundice-yellow eyes and ebony skin that glistened in the heat of the small apart ment, and I suppose there’s no point in withholding the fact that he was quite insane. He’d turn up several times a week, usually in the mornings for a cup of coffee; in his guayabera and slacks and white patent-leather loafers, carrying his zippered portfolio under one arm, he looked every inch the tropical man of affairs, but as soon as he opened his mouth you wanted to run for the doors.
“I have an appointment with Mandela this morning,” he might say, shrewdly tapping the portfolio he was never without. Another day it might be Thatcher or Mitterand, or he might be going to the palace to confer with President Aristide. The thing is, if you listened to him long enough, his delusions began to take on a plausible air. For most of his life he’d flirted around the edges of power, ever since he’d been a captain in the Haitian Army and launched an early, failed coup against Papa Doc. He could talk quite rationally about politics and history, and there was a gamesmanship to his madness, a playful self-aware quality, that kept us guessing as to how seriously he took himself.
He liked taunting the blans, the foreigners, best of all. If there were journalists at the apartment, and often there were since Ponce spoke English and lived near the Holiday Inn, Laurent would shake their hands and solemnly declare, “I am the lidder of the Haitian pipple!” Which was absurd, of course, but with time I found myself adjusting to the notion that, madness aside, Laurent would have made as decent a president as anyone could hope for. He spoke five languages, held degrees in business and economics, and boasted a distinguished if brief military career, and over the course of his harrowing thirty-year exile he’d kept body and soul together on four different continents. But Cuba had been his first stop, where he had offered his protean talents to the freshly anointed Minister of Industry, El Che. “We recognized at once that we were brothers,” Laurent told anyone who would listen. “He put me in charge of the of fice of Bureau of Statistics, and often I would accompany him as he traveled about the country inspecting projects of industrialization. We talked about so many things in our time together—about his life, about philosophy, about my dream of liberating Haiti, which he fully supported. ‘Laurent,’ he asked me on one occasion, ‘what is the first priority of government? What is the first thing you would do if you were President of Haiti?’
“‘Education,’ I said at once, ‘I would build schools, Comandante Guevara. To raise the awareness of the people.’
“‘Good answer,’ he said, ‘but wrong. Before schools, before medicine, before anything, there must be security. Security is the pre-condition for all other advances.’ Therefore,” Laurent continued, raising his voice to an imaginary crowd of thousands, “when I am elected president, the security of the nation will be my number one priority!”
“Don’t laugh when he talks like that,” Ponce told me later. “Don’t ever laugh when a Haitian tells you he’s going to be president, because it might happen. And if it does he won’t forget that you laughed at him.”
Ponce was right, of course—as proof we had the elections of several years before, when only a fluke of history kept Laurent from high office. After thirty years in exile,